Viewing its slowly dimming powers as they sank into the fading gold of the mist that the coming night thickened and darkened as it wiped out the light with a damp hand, Kan Wong dreamed over the stories that his father’s father—­now revered dust somewhere off toward the hills that dimly met the melting sky line—­had told him of that ruined city, wherein he, Kan Wong, had not Fate made men mad, would now be ruling a lordly household, even wearing the peacock feather and embroidered jacket that were his by right of the Dragon’s blood, that blood now hidden under the sun-browned skin of a river coolie.  Kan Wong stuffed fine-cut into his brass-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder box.  Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out, twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river mist.  His pipe became a wand of dreams summoning the genii of glorious memory.  The blood of the Dragon in his veins quickened from the lethargy to which drudgery had cooled it, and raced hotly as he thought of the battle past of his forefathers.  Off Somewhere along the river’s winding length, where it crawled slowly to the sea, lay the great coast cities.  The lazy ripples, light-tipped, beckoned with luring fingers.  There was naught to stay him.  His sampan was his home and movable, therefore the morrow would see him turning its bow downstream to seek that strange city where he had heard, dwelt many Foreign Devils who now and then scattered wealth with a prodigal hand.

In that pale hour when the mist, not yet dissipated by the rising sun, lay in a cold, silver veil upon the night-chilled water, he pushed out from the shore and pointed the sampan’s prow downstream.  Days it took him to reach salt water.  He loitered for light cargoes at village edges, or picked up the price of his daily rice at odd tasks ashore, but always, were it day or night for travel, his tiny craft bore surely seaward.  Mile after slow mile dropped behind him, like the praying beads of a lama’s chain, but at last the river salted slightly, and his tiny craft was lifted by the slow swell of the sea’s hand reaching for inland.

The river became more populous.  The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming.  As the stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist of rising smoke and man-stirred dust, the Foreign Devils’ fire junks appeared, majestically steaming up and down—­swift swans that scorned the logy, lumbering native craft, the mat sails and toiling sweeps of which made them appear motionless by comparison.  A day or two of this and then the coast, with Shanghai sprawling upon the bank, writhing with life, odoriferous, noisy, perpetually awake.